…my (lame) theory of everything.

This is a post on which I have been ruminating for a while, hoping to work out something substantial and formidable, but since I doubt that will ever actually happen, and since I’ve got one at home today (Joseph – the Catholic schools had a teacher in-service scheduled for today which is still on.) and am a little tired, I might as well take a shot at it before we head to the Y and the library for the rest of the morning.

Much of this goes back to some email conversations I had with an acquaintance who despite his generally "liberal" (for lack of a better word) leanings in Catholic Land was increasingly bothered by the poor or absent content from religious ed materials that his own children’s classes were using and by what he was given – both in terms of text and verbal instructions –  to teach adult Confirmation in his parish. It also goes back to the Fr. Barney fracas, in which even those who don’t give a fig about Latin or ad orientem were, let us say, less than pleased.

The caution at work in the heads and hearts of some, I suspect is a reluctance to be associated with "those people"  – the self-described Orthodox, the EWTN-ites, the Steubenville people..all the wrong people. It puts me in mind of two stories.

A few years ago, America magazine ran a postive review of Scott Hahn’s book on the Mass. I thought, "Huh. How did this get by?" Sure enough, the next issue or so, a strongly-worded letter to the editor appeared scolding the mag because Did You Not Know that This Hahn Fellow is part of the Closed-Minded-Repressive-Steubenville-EWTN-Papist Circle? Well, I never.

The second is related to me, and my slow entrance into the pro-life movement. It was years ago, I had my convictions, but I was reluctant to get involved because, you know, the movement was populated by Those People. Political reactionaries, anti-feminists, fundamenalists. So I ventured in and found my expectations confounded, of course. I wrote about it here, with the apt epigram from Peguy:

It will never be known what acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of not looking sufficiently progressive.

The conversation could go in a lot directions from this point – the ideological divisions within Western Catholicism that stop so many other conversations in their tracks and, more importantly, drain the evangelical spirit from Catholicism as we all look inward and at each other. But not today for that. Because it’s back to my Theory of Everything.

I think my Theory of Everything goes like this (and perhaps has been better stated elsewhere by Chesterton or Lewis or even Peguy. Who knows. I actually thought one of the Pontificator’s Laws related to this, but perhaps not. I’m sure that someone out there can point us to The Chapter in Some Hidden Treasure that will Solve Everything. Can you tell I’ve been engaged of Much Reading Aloud of A. A. Milne lately?):

Here ’tis:

Everything will eventually go haywire.

Therefore, it is safest to have  deeply-rooted, concrete, content-rich, standards and reference points expressive of tradition as our framework in order to keep us even within shouting distance of the original vision, aka The Truth.

Does that make sense? No, probably not. Perhaps when I say that the thinking is also inspired a bit by the current Anglican Troubles, it might make more sense.

I think the first sentence in my Theory deserves a bit of attention, first. The more I study history, the more I am convinced that the story of humanity is not so much progress but a succession of human screw-ups with different technologies, that’s all. Again, not original and perhaps just an evocation of various strains of conservative philosophies, but still a somewhat gradual ephiany for those who have been raised in the hothouse of Journey to Tomorrow.

And that goes for Church history, as well. Things will always go haywire. People will always attempt to turn situations and ideals to their own advantage, and…here’s the important part…people will always attempt, spiritually speaking, to do the minimum. The vast majority of us will always seek the broader road, we will seek to rationalize our way out of taking religious ideals seriously (Oh, what Jesus really meant was…), we will convince ourselves that faith is a matter of fitting God into our life, rather than shaping our own life around God. We will do this.

Therefore, any system, any organization that seeks to, well, organize us in our efforts needs to work with this reality, to take it into account.

So what that means, in concrete terms, is that if we, say, decide that young people and children need to know more about the Scriptures, to make it a part of their daily lives (good for us), but then we teach them to do this by:

1) Introducing the Scriptures to them via what is essentially Intro to Exegesis 101, with all kinds of talk about J and P and Q, as well as deep skepticism about the relationship of what’s on the page to anything that actually happened and

2) Decry memorization as a poor, useless pedagogy

3) Teach them a bit ‘o lectio divina on a couple of Wednesdays when we can squeeze it in

…what are most of our students going to do? What are we going to do?

Perhaps the super-motivated will take it to heart, as they take everything to heart, and give it a try. But what will most of the rest of us do? Take the test and never pick up a Bible, probably.

In those post-V2 years, much was made of human freedom, and the necessity of freedom in the spiritual life. How true! Read Galatians! Read Romans!

But….

given human nature…

what road will most of us take?

I spoke of something similar last night. Educated in the 70’s, I learned that the only real prayer was meditation and contemplation. Anything else was childish. End result for a busy, work-outside-the-home mother who geez louise, can never quite find the time or the quiet to take that 30 minutes a day to enter her Interior Castle?

Less prayer, not more.

Is this overly pessimistic about human nature? I don’t think so. I think it’s just realistic, and not in the sense that we need "rules"  – because that is not what the Gospel is about, at all. Not rules, but….the Truth? KInd of there…embodied in teaching, in the art that surrounds me, in the richness of devotions and diversity of prayers, in the strong witness of the saints. Okay, sometimes in rules. If I’m not bumping up against all of that, in whatever form it takes, if I’m not confronted with it, I am very likely to just go off on my own merry, solipsistic way.

Everything goes haywire. It even goes haywire when all of that stuff I outlined above is actually happening. It just goes haywire in a different direction. So, for example, a Catholic environment that emphasizes rote memorization of doctrinal summaries runs the risk of producing adherents who are living on just that level. A culture in which the liturgical emphasis is on things being done just so under the pain of mortal sin runs the risk of burying the spirit under the proper mechanics. A system that emphasizes authority runs the risk of becoming, well, authoritarian. Etc. It’s all happened, more times that we can count. And then the reform movements blaze through to try to correct things. Multiply examples as needed. 

But I think the difference between much of then (as in the past) and now is that even in the past when much-needed reformers like Benedict or St. Francis or St. Teresa of Avila or St. Francis de Sales and Jane de Chantal emerged, the basic framework still stood. There were limits.

Now, not so much.

Let’s look again at Paul, who forces us to look at human freedom. But consider the context, which is in contrast to the Law – not just any law, but Jewish Law, in the further context of identifying the People of God, their identity and mission. Paul extols freedom, but he also excoriates everyone from Galatians to Corinthians for essentially doing whatever the heck they wanted, letting something else besides Christ be their guiding paradigm, their rule, their canon, so to speak.

So what’s my point? What’s my theory really saying?

What is the Church? It’s the Body of Christ, the living expression of God’s Word on this earth. Our call – our responsibility  – as disciples is to let Christ live in us, through us, to protect and carefully pass on what we have been entrusted, to serve and love in His name, enlivened and empowered by the Spirit.

As human beings, our natural tendency is to want to make that as easy as possible for ourselves and to let the Spirit of the Age define us instead.

So with that in mind, we catechize. We pray. We worship. 

Truly, when you examine the various currents leading up to Vatican II, at least in this country – the lay movements that were engaged in gentle critiquing and tweaking of various spiritual practices and assumptions, what they were all about (and I’m going to take a closer look at this next week as I blog my way through a book I just read) was not making it all easier and less meaningful, but making it more meaningful. In digging deeper. The sense was that some accretions and habits needed to go, but no one expected they would be replaced with a free-for-all and an undefined, do-your-best spirituality untethered from anything specifically Catholic.

But in the cultural chaos of the 60’s and 70’s…things went haywire.

As they are wont to do.

So I suppose my point is that no matter what our intentions, when we untether ourselves from tradition – in the broadest sense – we are putting ourselves in a place where there are no real directions and where the wind just blows and blows. We don’t want to revisit past mistakes, but we do, it seems to me, want to be more aware of the reality that when we, say, give priests the freedom to make the liturgy what they want of it…they will. When we present children with a smorgasboard and say, "Well, it’s up to you to find what’s most meaningful…" they will. And it’s probably not going to be Matthew 25. It’s probably going to be PS3.

It’s such a knotty dynamic, because all of those spiritual masters I quoted earlier would tell us, over and over again, through their words and their personal witness, that life with God – faith – is a freely spoken "yes" to the gracious invitation of God to rest in his embrace. It is not manipulated or forced or memorized.

But in this world, on this earth, we are not immediately able to say that "yes." We live in a complex, confusing world in which darkness calls us, as well. In which darkness would like us to be confused and stay that way and to not know, to never know, Who really made us, Who really calls us, and Who really gives us peace and joy.

In that context, I am thinking more and more that since things go haywire, and that darkness within and without is so pervasive, that it just makes sense – and is not a matter of "liberal" or "conservative" to let the Church be the place where things are clearly stated, and where worship is structured so the temptations of the egos that run it are not given any room to be served – we are free to take it all or leave it – but at least we will know where we stand.